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Coldstreamer found interred on Dutch beach……

The 200-year-old body of a British Coldstream Guards soldier was found in sand dunes in the Netherlands. Who was he?

For more than two centuries, the remains of a soldier lay undisturbed on a windy beach in the northern Netherlands.

But in March 2011, birdwatchers discovered bones and metal artefacts among sand-dunes that had once been covered in asphalt.

The find was near an area known as the “Bonehole” because of the number of historic remains that had previously been unearthed.

A team of archaeologists was called in to dig further. Among them was 28-year-old Esther Poulus, whose involvement was to lead her to the National Archives in Kew, Surrey, in an attempt to discover the identity of the fallen soldier.

“We were taken to the site by the person who made the find, and it was quite hard to see,” she recalls. “You could only see it if you were really close, and even then it was only the larger bones from the legs that were visible. The bones were very degraded and mixed with the ground.”